11 - The acquisition of tense and aspect

Summary

The acquisition of tense–aspect markers has been an important area of inquiry that has generated intense controversy regarding the relationship between cognition and language, and the innate basis of language development. In this chapter, I will discuss these issues first from a crosslinguistic perspective, and then by focusing on the acquisition of Japanese.

Terminology

I will first review some terminology of tense and aspect, because in this area, researchers often use different terminology, which has resulted in much confusion in the field.

Tense locates a situation in relation to another reference point in time, and therefore is deictic. For example, English simple past tense locates a situation in relation to the speech time as the reference point. Aspect, on the other hand, concerns the temporal contour of the situation to be described by the verb (phrase). There are two levels of aspect that need to be considered in this chapter: inherent lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. Inherent lexical aspect (otherwise known as situation aspect or aktionsart) refers to the semantic characteristics of the predicate-argument structure. Vendler's (1957) four classes are the most well known:

1. State: love, contain, know, think that … ; aru “exist,” mieru “can be seen”

2. Activity: walk, think about … play the guitar; aruku “walk,” kangaeru “think”

3. Accomplishment: make a chair, walk to the store; oyu-o wakasu “boil water”

4. Achievement: reach the summit, die, notice; sinu “die,” otiru “drop”

State terms refer to stative situations that do not change unless some other force changes them. States are stative, while the other three classes are dynamic. Among the dynamic situations, activity terms involve duration, but they do not have an inherent endpoint. That is, one can stop the action at any time point, but the fact remains that the action has been done. Activity is therefore atelic (nontelic), not involving an inherent endpoint. Accomplishment terms, on the other hand, are telic, involving a necessary endpoint. Finally, achievement terms refer to situations that are linguistically conceived as punctual or instantaneous. Achievements, therefore, are [+punctual] and [+telic].